You can do more -- just let Jake Porway, founder and executive director of DataKind, be your inspiration. DataKind, as I've written previously, hosts events bringing together data experts and local charitable organizations in need of help understanding, mining, and analyzing their data.

Porway, who joined AllAnalytics.com for an e-chat yesterday (read the transcript here), said he had asked himself such questions last year while working as a data scientist for New York Times R&D and crunching data on the weekends at local hackathons. As he explained during our e-chat:

Like lots of you guys, being involved in the data world meant that I was witnessing daily how important data was going to be in business, government, and beyond. It seemed like every day I was reading a new blog post about how big data was disrupting healthcare or radically changing data-driven decisions in business. It was really exciting.

I was even more inspired to see that people were working with data in their spare time, leveraging powerful machine learning tools and scraping public datasets to build interactive visualizations and new data-driven products at nights and on weekend.

Jumping into hackathons and innovation challenges was a reprieve from the constraints of corporate work, but ultimately those activities took a toll on his psyche. He explained:

I was really dismayed that most of the work we were coming up with was "more of the same" -- parking apps, restaurant finders, daily deal sites. Just more mobile apps that made comfortable lives just a tiny bit more comfortable… I wanted to solve global warming, not help people buy cheaper iPads, and that was when I went off in search of a way to make that happen.

Now, Porway takes pride in work like an interactive visualization his DataKind volunteers developed for DC Action for Children, a nonprofit advocacy organization that collects statistics about child well-being. DC Action for Children is "super awesome, the team that's working with them from DataKind consistently blows my mind, and I'm just amazed at all the hard work both sides have done."

While the D.C. Kids Count prototype shows how the data comes together in an interactive visualization -- a "big step up" considering the organization usually just puts out a 200-page PDF of child stats, Porway noted -- the full product will have some spatial analysis and statistical analyses built in, too. Plus, this project "may end up being scaled out to all Kids Count programs, allowing national use of the tool."

Porway also cited work DataKind volunteers undertook to help an arm of the United Nations create a visualization of cellphone survey responses. The UN liked the results so much, Porway said, it kept working with the team and ultimately presented its work at the UN General Assembly. "The fact that six people who spend their days working at bit.ly and Amazon can go out, work on a project for a week, and show it to the UN is just incredible to me."

More broadly, Porway said, he's really in awe of the volunteer community at large:

I'm always amazed that even one person comes to spend their time using their skills for good, but seeing rooms full of 100+ people spending their weekends hacking to solve poverty or help with humanitarian crises is just breathtaking. And having them come up and say, "Man, I didn't know I could do these things -- how do I keep helping?" gives me the chills every time.

Attend a DataDive and get yourself some chills. And no worries if one isn't coming to a city near you. DataKind even plans to offer DataDive kits. After all, Porway said:

The goal of all of this is not to be a crutch for organizations, but to engender a world where every non-profit is data-driven. As such, we are meticulously collecting the lessons we've learned from these projects so we can establish common tools, best-practices, and resources that we can hand over to organizations so they can become data-driven themselves.

Beth thank you for bringing our attention to this critical organization that is demonstrating everyday what we all knew--- data can change lives, impact communities and influence the world we all call home.

What a great way to maximize the value of not only contributions but the volunteer efforts of individuals. By better understanding best practices, these organizations will have greater abilities to do good.

2015 Visual Analytics Interactive RoadshowSAS(r) experts are coming to a city near you in a series of live, interactive workshops focused on SAS Visual Analytics, including how to prepare your data for VA, the integration of VA with Office Analytics and a Visual Statistics demo.

LEADERS FROM THE BUSINESS AND IT COMMUNITIES DUEL OVER CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY ISSUES

The Current Discussion

Visual Analytics: Who Carries the Onus?

The Issue: Data visualization is an up-and-coming technology for businesses that want to deliver analytical results in a visual way, enabling analysts the ability to spot patterns more easily and business users to absorb the insight at a glance and better understand what questions to ask of the data. But does it make more sense to train everybody to handle the visualization mandate or bring on visualization expertise? Our experts are divided on the question.

The hospitality industry gathers massive amounts of customer data, and mining that data effectively can yield tremendous results in terms of improved CRM, better-targeted marketing spend, and more efficient back-end processes. Roger Ares, vice president of analytics at Hyatt Corp., discusses the ways he and his staff use big data.

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The big-data analytics market can be a confusing place. Among the vendors vying for your dollars are traditional database management providers, Hadoop startup services, and IT giants. In this video, All Analytics editors Beth Schultz and Michael Steinhart sit down in a Google+ Hangout on Air with Doug Henschen, executive editor of InformationWeek. Henschen discusses use cases for big-data analytics, purchase considerations, and his recent roundup of the top 16 big-data analytics platforms.

At the National Retail Federation BIG Show last month, All Analytics executive editor Michael Steinhart noted a host of solutions for tracking and analyzing customer activity in retail stores. From Bluetooth beacons to RFID tags to NFC connections to video analytics, retailers must find the right combination of tools to help optimize the shopper experience, streamline operations, and boost revenues.

The days when historical shipment trends and gut feelings were enough to forecast retail demand accurately are long over. SAS chief industry consultant Charles Chase outlines the benefits of pulling real-time sales information from point-of-sale and product scanner systems, then flowing that data into dynamic forecasting tools from SAS.

With today's advanced visual analytics tools, you can stream data into memory for real-time processing, provide users the ability to explore and manipulate the data, and bring your data to life for the business.

Dynamic data visualizations let analysts and business users interact with the data, changing variables or drilling down into data points, and see results in a flash. Advance your use of data visualization with tools that support features like auto-charting, explanatory pop-ups, and mobile sharing.

No doubt your enterprise is amassing loads of data for fact-based decision-making. Hand in hand with all that data comes big computational requirements. Can traditional IT infrastructure handle the increasing number and complexity of your analytical work? Probably not, which is why you need a backend rethink. Big data calls for a high-performance analytics infrastructure, as Fern Halper, a partner at the IT consulting and research firm, Hurwitz & Associates, discusses here.

Redbox's bright-red DVD kiosks are all but ubiquitous these days, located in more than 28,000 spots across the country. Jayson Tipp, Redbox VP of Analytics and CRM, provides an insider's look at how the company has accomplished its phenomenal nine-year growth.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), a seven-brand global hotelier, has woven analytics into the fabric of its operations. David Schmitt, director of performance strategy and planning, shares IHG's analytics story and his lessons learned.